Thomas J. J. Altizer (1927-)

Thomas J.J. Altizer is one of the most interesting and
distinctive theological thinkers of the twentieth century. Altizer was born in
Cambridge, Massachusetts, September 28, 1927, and was raised in the Episcopal
Church. He completed his entire tertiary education at the University of Chicago:
A. B., A. M., and Ph. D. He was a student in the renowned History of Religions
program at that university (his first book was dedicated in memory of his
teacher, Joachim Wach). His doctoral work culminated in a dissertation examining
Carl Jung’s understanding of religion. What he learned at Chicago of the
approach of modern historical consciousness to religious ‘objects’ has
profoundly shaped Altizer’s assessment of the contemporary theological
situation. He was also strikingly influenced by Buddhist thought during this
period, and the encounter with Eastern religions helps provide explicit
framework for his early books. Altizer taught at Wabash College from 1954-1956,
then moved to Emory University as professor of Bible and Religion until 1968.
The "death of God" theology became a heated debate during his professorship at
Emory. Although he was not removed from his teaching position, he accepted a
position at the State University of New York, Stony Brook in 1968 as professor
of English.

Altizer’s first teaching post was as Assistant Professor
of Religion at Wabash College. In 1956 he moved to take a post as Assistant
Professor of Bible and Religion at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia. His
first publication, an article entitled “Religion and Reality,” appeared in 1958.
Already, Altizer was signaling concerns which have been tenaciously explored and
exposited throughout his career: the distinctly Christian dimensions of
modernity; secularization and the future of theology; the encounter of world
religions, and Christian apocalypticism.

In 1961 Altizer published Oriental Mysticism and
Biblical Eschatology, a text in which he endeavors to explicate the thesis
that modern men and women cannot accept religion as a mode of encounter with
anything truly real. The antithesis of religion and reality which he finds in
modernity, he then correlates theologically with mystical expressions of
Madhyamika and Yogacara schools of Buddhism. Mircea Eliade and the Dialectic
of the Sacred followed in 1963. The theological weight of this book is borne
in the second half, in which Eliade’s conception and evocation of the sacred for
modern, critical thought is compared with literary modernist exponents of the
profane consciousness as the dialectical path to epiphanies of the sacred. In
this text, as he did not in the previous one, Altizer has engaged with a more
dialectical thought-process. From then on, Altizer has developed as probably the
most consistent and demanding dialectician in contemporary theology.

Altizer’s next publication was The New Apocalypse: The
Radical Christian Vision of William Blake. The text underscored Altizer’s
turn to literature for theological speech, and demonstrated his apprenticeship
to Hegel. “Most startling of all,” Altizer later reflected, “we find a fully
systematic theology in this book. It is a theology purporting to be the
expression of a radical Christian tradition–a tradition unknown to the world of
Christian theology. . . .” (Altizer 1978: 625)

The vocabulary of “radical” Christianity and its contrast
with ecclesiastical Christianity prevailed through the rest of the 1960s, the
period of Altizer’s most public visibility, as evangelist of “the death of God.”
In the northern Autumn of 1965, Time magazine and several similar mass
publications ran stories on a new movement of theologians purportedly united in
the claim that “God is dead.” Besides Altizer were included William Hamilton,
Gabriel Vahanian, Richard Rubenstein (a Jewish thinker). Harvey Cox and Paul Van
Buren also were added to the group by some commentators. Two books by Altizer,
Radical Theology and the Death of God (a collection of essays in
collaboration with William Hamilton) and The Gospel of Christian Atheism
came out in 1966, and a national conference on “radical theology” also met that
year. Both books were aimed at broader audiences and evidently reached their
target: Altizer received letters from people warning him of, if not taking
comfort from, the likelihood of his eternal damnation, as well as from people
expressing relief and hope gained from his justifications of the uniqueness of
Christianity and centrality despite, indeed because of, the end of transcendence
declared as the death of God.

At the time of publication of his next work, The
Descent into Hell, Altizer had taken a position as Professor of English at
the State University of New York, Stony Brook (he later became the first
chairman of an interdisciplinary program in religious studies there). The book
draws together the various topics of his thought again but, the preface claims,
“it marks a new direction and a fresh voyage. For I am losing all sense of the
particular identity of the Christian faith, and have become persuaded that
Christ is actively and immediately present wherever darkness or Hell is actual
and real” (13). The “particular identity” of the Christian faith was further
placed at stake in The Self-Embodiment of God, which appeared in 1977.
The work is an ontological systematization of Altizer’s thought, a stunning
theological ontology (though not an ontotheology) coordinating categories
achieved through a dialectical analysis of ‘silence’ and ‘speech,’ with the
epic biblical categories of Genesis, Exodus, Judgment, Incarnation and
Apocalypse. This was followed in 1980 by Total Presence: The Language of
Jesus and the Language of Today. Perhaps as a result of the systematic work
of the previous text, Total Presence goes beyond engaging the loss of
transcendence and suggests possible concrete signs of actual divine immanence,
that is, of ‘God’s’ “total presence,” through a dialectical negation of the
total isolation of the subjectivity of modern persons. For instance:

The power embodied in jazz
violently shatters our interior, as its pure rhythm both returns us to an
archaic identity and hurls us into a new and posthistoric universality. Most
startling of all, the “noise” of jazz releases a new silence, a silence marked
by the absence of every center of selfhood, the disappearance of the solitude of
the “I.” That silence is the silence of a new solitude, an absolute solitude
which has finally negated and reversed every unique and interior ground of
consciousness, thereby releasing the totality of consciousness in a total and
immediate presence And we rejoice when confronted with this solitude, just as we
rejoice in hearing jazz, for the only true joy is the joy of loss, the joy of
having been wholly lost and thereby wholly found again. (107-108.)

Genesis and Apocalypse: A Theological Voyage toward
Authentic Christianity, also published 1990, is a more systematic
theological counterpart to Total Presence, embarking on a venture into
modern nihilism in the conviction that: “[O]ur deepest atheism is an
anti-Christian atheism, as most clearly manifest in Nietzsche, and therefore our
uniquely modern nihilism is an anti-Christian nihilism, and one, indeed, that
would be impossible apart from Christianity.” Altizer continues, “But if
Nietzsche and Joyce alike could celebrate that nihilism as a liberating
nihilism, and liberating above all in that absolute affirmation or Yes-saying
which it alone makes possible, that Yes is the Yes which the Christian knows as
the Yes of the gospel, a Yes which faith knows as a total Yes, and a total Yes
which is an all comprehending totality.” (25-26.) Altizer’s other major works
include History as Apocalypse (1985), The Genesis of God: A
Theological Genealogy (1993), and The Contemporary Jesus (1997).
Altizer is also the author of numerous articles, reviews and essays. His work
has been widely translated, and he continues to attract the admiration and
fascination of theological thinkers grappling with our contemporary situation.
Altizer retired from SUNY Stony Brook in 1995, redubbing his home address, “The
Institute for Christian Nihilism.”

While themes and some developments in Altizer’s
theological thinking have been described, the contours and movement of that
thinking demand more attention. Altizer responds to a cluster of closely
interconnected religious problems which have been thrown up for and by modern
consciousness. Altizer was clear from an early date about whom he imagines his
audience to be. The preface to Oriental Mysticism and Biblical Eschatology
notes that the book:

. . . was written with the hope
that the very abyss of faith in which we must live may paradoxically make
possible a deeper encounter with the authentic meaning of religion. For “modern
man” has lost his homeland in faith. . . . We moderns are immersed in a profane
world that charges the immediate moment with absolute meaning and value. To us,
religion can only appear as an alien reality. In our sensibility, the religious
Reality can manifest itself only as the Other. Therefore man, qua modern man,
cannot associate religion with “reality.” (9.)

Modern men and women face the religious problems of the
desacralization or disenchantment of the world at the hands of their
objectifying scientific knowledge and the radical relativization of all human
values through coming to consciousness of the historicity of human being. The
world which comes to view through these allied ways of knowing is utterly
profane. This cultural articulation of the religious problems has a
‘metaphysical’ side to it, too; whether and how the sacred can relate to such a
world. The authoritative voice of religions is silenced for modern men and
women; they “can apprehend the historical reality of all religions, but in no
authentic sense can [they] respond to the reality of religion itself . . . .
Today the theologian can know religion only as idolatry, for he can know
religion only as a historical phenomenon, as an ideology, as a product of human
grasping and will to power.” (ibid., 156.) This radical loss of transcendence is
one level of the meaning of the death of God. There is nothing other than the
reality we give ourselves through will to power since there is no absolutely
Other.

Theologians of the modern period have, for the most part
in Altizer’s view, made a misguided response to this problem. Perhaps the most
important result of historical critical study of Christian history has been the
rediscovery that Jesus’ conceptual and ethical and imaginative worlds were
determined by apocalyptic expectation. Ironically, the very mode of knowledge
which recovered that understanding makes it that much more alien,
incomprehensible and offensive to modern intelligence. The modern Christian
theological response was to abandon religion in the name of the subjectivity of
faith. A 1960 article, “Demythologizing and Jesus” (much of which was
incorporated into Oriental Mysticism and Biblical Eschatology) charges:

Efforts to maintain that the
imminence of the eschatological event is no more than an expression of the
intensity of faith, that eschatology is merely a temporal representation of an
eternal meaning and value, or that eschatological faith is simply an
incontrovertible assurance that God will act, must all be recognized as
modernizations of the gospel which are far removed from the ecstatic faith of
the early Christians. (566.)

The demythologizing program, which Altizer argues (thanks
to Bultmann) permeates even the Barthian program, suppresses more fundamental
questions for the sake of answers generated out of the contemporary world view.
But Altizer, a fervent partisan of the sacred, of religious Reality, refuses
such a faith. Christian theology will not get off the hook by negating Jesus’
person and message; not by elevating him as a god, or by leaping out of history
in ‘faith’ and thereby reflecting more affirmation back upon this world in
radical disjunction from any kind of relation to the sacred. Altizer has
steadfastly refused to compromise on his demand that theology face up to the
offense of the apocalyptic Jesus whose faith was rooted in absolute negation of
this-worldly consciousness. For an ‘historical religion,’ it may be observed,
Christianity has a passle of problems coming to terms with its own historical
actualities.

Suppression of the answers of the gospel is not a new
error. Christian theology stepped out of the tradition centuries ago when it
turned Jesus into a heavenly king. The genuinely Christian apocalyptic
imagination survived, not in Christendom, but in an ‘underground’ tradition of
‘heretical’ radical Christianity, with its focal achievements in the cultural
glories of, especially, Dante, Milton, Blake and Joyce. The very meaning of the
incarnation is that God is in the world, wholly and without remainder. The bad
faith of the church only confirms this: “the world of Christian theology . . .
is irredeemably satanic insofar as it is bound to the dead body of that God
negated and left behind by the forward and apocalyptic movement of the
incarnation.”(Ibid, 626) The apocalyptic faith of Jesus is that God is unveiled
fully in a radical self-negation or kenosis. The crucifixion is both death and
resurrection, a symbol of the death of the transcendent God “once and for all”
resurrected not as a lord who returns to heaven but as the radical profanity of
worldly presence.

Altizer makes no bones about this. In his earlier work, as
noted previously, it seemed that Altizer wanted to bring back the world-negation
of apocalyptic expectation as a kind of supplement for the modern predicament.
But he quickly realized, through a more nuanced dialectic, that:

If we allow Heidegger to speak
for the being that is manifest in our time, we could say that genuinely
contemporary human existence is finitude, that the nothingness which has
been resurrected by the death of God is the source of the Angst that has
identified being and time, that in the “night of the world” in which we live,
transcendence can only appear as immanence, eternity can be present, if at all,
only in time itself. But can a genuine epiphany of eternity take place in the
context of such a mode of human existence? Is a radically profane mode of
existence open to the presence of the sacred? Can eternity become manifest upon
the plane of radical finitude? (Mircea Eliade and the Dialectic of the Sacred,
107.)

Under such conception, the death of God signifies not just
a lack, an absence, but that absence is present precisely as absence. And it is
only as such absence that God could be truly and actually present in the modern
world. From this point, Altizer is freed to pursue his radical yea-saying to the
death of God.

It would be a mistake to think that it is merely Altizer’s
yea-saying, or of modern men and women generally. Altizer is driven to produce a
genuinely theological thinking that is beholden to no term except God, and so
his works are to some extent also attempts to enact this thinking and not just
describe its concepts. If the death of God were simply an historical matter then
we would conclude that God had been overtaken by events; that we were justified
in thinking God to be obsolete. However, the death of God is not a merely
historical event although, because, it actually occurs in our history. From the
primordial silence of nothingness came speech (“And God said . . .”), so that
now:

If we pronounce the name of God
in speaking of beginning, an absolute or final beginning, then the name which we
pronounce bears the imprint of that beginning, and thereby it is a name of that
which is in exile from itself. Of course, every name which we pronounce bears
that imprint, but God is the name of names, the name of the source of names, the
name of the source and the ground of absolute beginning. Thus God is the name of
exile . . . .(Self-Embodiment of God, 29.)

What Altizer indicates by this “meditative analysis and
reencatment of the origin, identity, movement and actuality of speech” (ibid.,
6) is that “simply to pronounce that name is not only to evoke the necessity of
speech but to sanction it as well. Thereby speech sanctions its ground, and [it]
sanctions it by naming it, by naming it as God.” (ibid., 41.) You can’t just get
away with speaking ‘God’ as an ‘innocent’ curse, a surd, a non-sequitur. The
language evokes its very ground in its own dialectical operations.

Altizer has been called a practitioner of ‘theopoesis’ and
of ‘theology by incantation.’ There is much of that in the economy of his
writing, yet he does more than simply weave a spell, as though magic could bring
back all that Christianity has lost and destroyed through its own history.
Altizer has brought about a radical, theological re-reading of that history,
reclaiming secularization as a divine act of total, apocalyptic kenosis.
Faithfulness to God requires actually participating in God’s death. Only God’s
‘killers’ hear and obey the ‘gospel of Christian atheism,’ and they only can
share in the apocalyptic joy and expectation of a new world.

Christianity, Oriental
Mysticism and Biblical Eschatology (1961),
Truth, Myth and Symbol,
ed. Altizer, William Beardslee, and J. Harvey Young (1962),
Mircea Eliade and the
Dialectic of the Sacred (1963),
Radical Theology and the
Death of God, ed. Altizer and William Hamilton (1966),
The Gospel of Christian
Atheism (1966),
The New Apocalypse: The
Radical Christian Vision of William Blake (1967),
The Descent into Hell
(1970),
The Self-Embodiment of God
(1977),
Total Presence: The Language
of Jesus and the Language of Today (1980),
History as Apocalypse
(1985),
Genesis and Apocalypse: A
Theological Voyage Toward Authentic Christianity (1990), and
The Genesis of God: A
Theological Genealogy (1993),
Godhead and the Nothing (2003),
Living the Death of God: A
Theological Memoir (2006).

The Task of Radical Theology and Dialectical Method

Altizer observes that American theology is in the process of transition. The
emergence of radical theology replaces the older forms of faith, in which the
traditional faith is passing and has no relevance to the present. The revolution
of radical theology reverses the old forms of theology that is based on the God
of Christian tradition. For Altizer, the task of theology must abandon the
theology created by Christendom and embrace the dawn of radical theology that
proclaims the good news of the "death of God." Theology in order to be authentic
must experience death and rebirth. Theology must die first and cease to be
itself. If theology is truly to die, it must will the "death of God" in
Christendom. In order for a new theology to be reborn, everything that theology
has affirmed must be negated. Authentic theology cannot be reborn "unless it
passes through and freely wills its own death and dissolution.” Theology is now
impelled to employ the very language that proclaims the "death of God" (Altizer
1966, 16). Theology today must embrace the radically profane form of
contemporary existence to prepare for a theology that seeks to unite the radical
sacred and the radical profane. Radical theology is moving towards a profane
destiny. Its task is to provide a way to return to "God who is all in all that
enables theology not to return to an old form of the sacred but welcomes the God
that affirms the profane" (19).

Altizer’s concern is the connection of the sacred to the profane and how to
make the Christian faith relevant to the modern secular world. The task of
radical theology is to affirm the profane, which has been negated by the
Christian tradition. The problem that theology faces, according to Altizer, is
the danger of Gnosticism where religion becomes a negation of the world. Gnostic
thinking escapes the reality of the present that makes faith becomes irrelevant
to the world. The problem created by Gnosticism is that it emphasizes the split
of the sacred and the profane, wanting to affirm life by moving towards the
sacred and negates the profane (Altizer 1966, 144). "Gnosticism is a form of
world opposing faith in which it seeks salvation by a radical kind of world
negation" (19). Altizer emphasizes that Gnosticism is dangerous to the Christian
faith because of its world negation; it denies the possibility of redemption. A
theology that holds to the theology of Christendom that dichotomize the "sacred
and the profane, cannot escape the charge of Gnosticism. The affirmation of the
traditional forms of faith becomes a Gnostic escape from the brute realities of
history" (95). The Gnostic attitude of separating the sacred and the profane
leads God to be unrecognized in the world leading to a Godless world. Faith no
longer works in the profane. The problem of Altizer is how to make faith become
meaningful to the secular world and how to speak a theology that affirms the
profane (28-9). Altizer’s concern is to save Christianity from the danger of
Gnosticism.

In order to free Christianity from the Gnostic bondage, it needs a
dialectical form of faith. A genuinely dialectical faith can never be Gnostic.
The dialectical method always constitutes the principle of negation and
affirmation. "The dialectical faith’s negation of history is grounded in the
affirmation of the present"(Altizer 1966, 110). The task of theology must now
accept a dialectical vocation in which it must learn the language of affirmation
and negation. It must sense the possibility of yes, which can become no and no
which can become yes. In short, "theology must be born out of a truly
dialectical method through the negation and affirmation which culminates on the
"coincidence of the opposites" (Altizer 1966, 109-10). Initially, Eliade’s study
of religions helps Altizer understand the dialectical relation between the
sacred and the profane. Though the sacred and the profane radically oppose each
other, at the same time they mutually require each other. The ultimate meaning
of the dialectic is realized when the opposition of the sacred and profane is
overcome in the "coincidence of the opposites." The profane is radically negated
leading to a deeper movement into the sacred, in which the profane is
transformed and at the same time losing and manifesting its identity with the
sacred. According to Altizer, this is the religious movement of both the
Oriental mysticism and traditional Christianity, in which the "coincidence is
realized through the abolition of the profane as profane" (Ogletree 1966, 83-4).
This attitude is also a manifestation of a Gnostic religion, a flight from the
world, "wanting to experience salvation by negating the world and moves to the
sacred" (Altizer 1966, 144). The profane is annulled and suffers from a Gnostic
injury.

According to Altizer, this kind of movement by collapsing the profane into
the sacred is a violation to the faith of the New Testament and the Christian
meaning of the Incarnation. The dissolution of the profane into the sacred has
been the characteristic of the Christian tradition, a manifestation of Gnostic
thinking, which does not affirm the world. According to Altizer, this is a
heresy. The doctrine of the Incarnation affirms the profane rather than abolish
it. Only in affirming the reality of the profane can make the genuine
coincidence of the opposites possible, that is, the coming together of the
reality of the sacred and the profane. This coincidence of the opposing reality
of the sacred and the profane makes Christianity’s celebration of the
Incarnation a real event, effecting a real transformation of the world. Faith in
this dialectical sense must negate the sacred. A sacred that abolishes the
profane cannot affirm the Incarnation and can never understand the true meaning
of the Incarnation. A faith that virtually negates the profane can never realize
the promise of redemption (Altizer 1966, 149).

The Doctrine the Incarnation and God’s Self-negation

Altizer’s The Gospel of Christian Atheism tries to combine biblical
and philosophical theology. He tries to build a radical doctrine of the
Incarnation on the concept of kenosis. Altizer finds the dialectic of Hegel
helpful in reinterpreting the Incarnation. According to Altizer, Hegel’s idea of
kenosis and the dialectical process of self-negation of being, provides him a
way of interpreting the self-emptying of the Incarnation in which he find a
poetic visioning as expressed in the work of Blake. In other words, Blake
supplies Altizer a poetic vision and Hegel supplies the philosophical agenda to
interpret the vision. Altizer uses Phil. 2:7 as a biblical base for a kenotic
doctrine of the Incarnation and by using the metaphysics of Hegel’s idealism as
a philosophical framework (Cobb 1970, 33-4).

Altizer’s doctrine of the Incarnation is an inversion of the traditional
Christian thinking. The traditional thinking conforms to the dissolution of the
profane to the sacred. Altizer asserts that only in the self-emptying of God can
provide redemption of the profane world. "When the sacred and the profane are
understood as a dialectic opposites where mutual negation culminates in a
transformation of each into its repetitive "other" then the Christian
coincidence of opposites becomes the eschatological realization of the
dialectical union of the original sacred and the radical profane (Altizer 1966,
155). Altizer contends that a truly "Christian theology must affirm the union of
the sacred into the profane and affirm the profane as profane" (155). The
movement of the sacred into the profane is explained by the dialectical movement
of the kenotic Incarnation of the Word. Altizer’s kenotic Incarnation is a
forward movement of God into the human flesh by self-emptying with the form of
God (Phil. 2). Understood in this way, the kenotic movement of the Incarnation
is a continuing "process of Spirit becoming flesh, the movement of the sacred
becoming profane" (Altizer 1966, 152). This is Altizer’s doctrine of
self-negation of God grounded from his kenotic christology. Altizer’s kenotic
Incarnation means the self-emptying of God completely from his transcendent form
to and become totally incarnate in the world. Kenosis is a "total process in
which a pure transcendent God becomes a totally immanent actuality" (Noel 1970,
176).

Altizer found kenosis as the expression of God’s self-negation through the
Incarnate Word. The self-negation of the Spirit is the expression of God’s
self-sacrifice manifested in the kenotic Incarnation of Jesus Christ. This makes
God’s self-sacrifice a redemptive act of self-negation. God’s kenotic
Incarnation manifests the total presence of Jesus in the world, which is also
the expression of Jesus’ act of redemption of the profane. The "death of God" as
manifested in the kenotic Incarnation can be viewed a doctrine of redemption.
The profane is redeemed through the unity and actual presence of Christ in
history by the reality of the kenotic Incarnation. This shows the total
self-giving love of God. The absolute negativity as the expression of God’s
total self-giving is also a manifestation of God’s act of redemption (Ogletree
1966, 69).

The Meaning of the "Death of God"

Altizer’s "death of God" has two phases. Altizer’s early notion of the "death
of God" is understood in "historical-existential" terms (Cobb 1970, 34). Viewed
in this way, the "death of God" according to Altizer is an historical event,
"that God has died in our time, in our history, in our existence" (Altizer 1966,
11). The experience of the profane affirms the "death of God." Later, with the
coming into terms with the dialectic of Hegel, Altizer was able to reconcile
philosophy and theology, "the death of God" is ontologized and universalized.
The "death of God" becomes the "self-annihilation of the Spirit primordial
nature and deficient actuality (the transcendent being), pours into the world
and becomes flesh. The "death of God" is now seen in ontological and existential
terms" (Cobb 1970, 34). The "death of God" is not only a designation of an
historical event but also a theological assertion about Christ and the meaning
of his presence in the secular world. Altizer’s problem is how such a theology
of the "death of God" can "contribute to the emergence of a profane form of
faith in our time" (Ogletree 1966, 86). Again, Hegel’s idea of negativity
provides Altizer with a perspective in the affirmation of the "death of God."
Negation in Hegel’s thought refers to the dissolution of a given actuality as a
precondition for the emergence of a new possibility through a forward movement
process. In the light of Hegel’s principle of negativity, Altizer interprets the
"death of God as God’s own act of self-negation. In Jesus Christ, God has
emptied himself into the world. Altizer asserts the legitimacy of speaking about
the "death of God" by emphasizing, "the principle of negation as realized in the
actualization of the profane that requires the negation of the sacred" (90).

"God is dead" as the "Wholly Other" who in isolation beyond the world remain
unaffected by the world processes. The Spirit’s forward movement into the
process has resulted in the radical transformation of his being. "The
transcendence has been transformed wholly into immanence" (Ogletree 1966, 90-1).
This is the meaning of the Christian affirmation of the "death of God" according
to Altizer. The central theme for Altizer is to affirm the nature of God’s
presence in the world. (92). The ‘death of God’ for Altizer is a divine
sacrifice for the redemption of the profane. It is an expression of divine love.
God’s self-annihilation is an act of redeeming and affirming God’s creation. In
this sense, Altizer insists that only a Christian can affirm the "death of God."
The "death of God" is God’s act of affirming the profane as rooted in the
positive significance of God’s self-sacrifice. Viewed in this way, the "death of
God" is fundamentally a redemptive event in which humanity is liberated from the
clutches of the "Wholly Other" (93). Altizer wants us to follow the logic of the
Incarnation as a forward movement in which God, the "Wholly Other’s"
self-emptying in totality is realized in the forward movement of history (95).
Altizer’s radical theology attempts to interpret the contemporary form of Christ
presence in the world (95). His innermost concern is for us to detach from the
traditional understanding of God. The Christian traditional understanding of God
has isolated God from the world that made God static, unaffected and remote from
the world realities. Altizer’s project is to affirm Christ’s presence in the
world in such a way to enable us to affirm the "death of God" theologically
(99).

Altizer was influenced by Nietzsche’s radical philosophy, particularly on the
repudiation of the Western Christian tradition as expressed on Nietzsche’s "God
is dead." Nietzsche’s proclamation of the "death of God" has shattered the
transcendent being of Christendom (Altizer 1966, 98). Altizer’s radical
theology, which is based wholly on the presupposition of the "death of God," has
led to the collapse of the transcendent being. The "death of God" as the
negation of the pure transcendent God of the Christian tradition is what Altizer
termed "Atheism." "Atheism" in this sense is a criticism of a remote God. "This
God beyond the world is a non-redemptive God who by virtue of his sovereign
transcendent stand wholly apart from the historical presence of the Incarnation"
(62). For Altizer, this transcendent God cannot redeem the world. Therefore, it
must be declared dead. The saying that "God is dead," radical theologians
attempts to say that the transcendent ground of the world has died. But
ultimately, God died for the redemption of the world (Altizer 1967, 78). The
affirmation of the "death of God" is Christianity’s act of transforming the
original old faith of the transcendent "Wholly Other." This makes Christianity
become a world affirming religion. The "death of the Christian God" implies that
the "transcendence of Being has been transformed into radical immanence" (Altizer
1966, 101). Radical theology’s "death of God" claims that the absolute
transcendence is transfigured to absolute immanence (98). The originally
transcendent sacred becomes immanent. The formerly separated realms of reality,
the sacred and the profane, are becoming into one. The sacred now is in the
midst of the profane (Noel 1970, 175). Therefore, to speak of the "death of God"
is to "speak of a movement of God from transcendence to immanence (Altizer 1967,
11). The concept of the "death of God" becomes a confession of faith that
affirms God’s self-negation as expressed in the Incarnation is a manifestation
of God’s redemptive act in history.

Altizer, Thomas J. J. 1967. The New Apocalypse: The
Radical Christian Vision of William Blake. East Lansing: Michigan State
University Press.

Altizer, Thomas J. J. 1967. Toward a New Christianity:
Readings in the Death of God Theology. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World,
Inc.

Altizer, Thomas J. J. 1967. “The Death of God and the
Uniqueness of Christianity.” In The History of Religions: Essays on the
Problem of Understanding. Ed. Joseph M. Kitagawa with the collaboration of
Mircea Eliade and Charles H. Long. Chicago and London: University of Chicago
Press. 119-141.

Altizer, Thomas J. J. 1967. “The Significance of the New
Theology.” In The Death of God Debate. Ed. Jackson Lee Ice and John J.
Carey. Philadelphia: The Westminster Press. 242-255.

Altizer, Thomas J. J. 1970.The Descent into Hell: A
Study of the Radical Reversal of the Christian Consciousness. Philadelphia
and New York: J. B. Lippincott Company. (A paperback edition was published in
NewYork in 1979 by The Seabury Press.)

Altizer, Thomas J. J. 1972. “An Inquiry into the Meaning
of Negation in the Dialectical Logics of East and West.” In Religious
Language and Knowledge. Ed. Robert H. Ayers and William T. Blackstone.
Athens: University of Georgia Press. 97-118.

Altizer, Thomas J. J. 1972. “Method in Dipolar Theology
and the Dipolar Meaning of God.” In Philosophy of Religion and Theology.
Comp. David Ray Griffin. Chambersburg, Pa.: American Academy of Religion.

Altizer, Thomas J. J. 1985. “Theology as Reflection upon
the Roots of Christian Culture.” In The Vocation of the Theologian. Ed.
and with an introduction and epilogue by Theodore W. Jennings, Jr. Philadelphia:
Fortress Press. 135-142.

Lantz, George Benjamin, Jr. 1971. A Critique of the
Theologies of Thomas J. J. Altizer and William Hamilton from the Perspective of
Historical-Critical Research on the New Testament. Ph.D. dissertation.
Boston University Graduate School.

Murchland, Bernard (ed.). 1967. The Meaning of the
Death of God: Protestant, Jewish and Catholic Scholars Explore Atheistic
Theology. New York: Random House.

Noel, Daniel C. 1970. "Thomas Altizer and the Dialectic of
Regression," in
The Theology of Altizer:
Critique and Response. John B. Cobb, Jr. ed., Philadelphia: The
Westminster Press.

Odin, Steve. 1987. “Kenosis as a Foundation for
Buddhist-Christian Dialogue: The Kenotic Buddhology of Nishida and Nishitani of
the Kyoto School in Relation to the Kenotic Christology of Thomas J. J. Altizer.”
The Eastern Buddhist (new series) 20: 34-61.